Pirates Gold: Lighting, Rendering, Compositing & Editing

With the animations done, all that is left to do is finish up the lighting then begin exporting it out to make it into a short movie. I only put one ambient light into the scene as all I wanted to achieve was some soft shadows to make everything a little more defined. All the textures have their own highlights and shadows already essentially faking lighting. Creating an omni light I increased the sample size to 64 giving the scene a little more quality for the next step which is rendering.

I now understand why people always whine about the rendering process. It’s bloody long!!. My short 33 second film took me a little over 10 hours to completely render out, and its a simple stylized scene with few assets and almost no particle effects. I can’t even imagine how long a frame on a big blockbuster film or game would take. I’ve heard some studios can spend days rendering out a single frame. There wasn’t much to the rendering process for my project really, I just made sure the settings were right for the brief and basically sat back for ten hours. There was one thing I had to do, and I’m not sure if there’s an easier way of doing this, but because my scene had multiple cameras filming, I simply selected the range I had set up for a particular camera then rendered that selection out. I couldn’t figure out if there was a way to do one big render with all the cameras rendering their correct sequence of frames. A question for the lecturers next week I think.

When the rendering was finally done I threw it into Adobe Premier for compositing and editing. I wanted to put it into Adobe After Effects first to give it some flair, but unfortunately I don’t think I have enough time. With the other video editing and the potentially problematic upload of this large file to the campuses computer, it would be a risk for me to use After Effects as I’ve never used it before and will most likely waste hours of time trying to achieve something minimalist. So with Premier I ensured that the animation played well, which it did then I added a simple fade to the ending. Found a nice pirate themed song to give the film some life, and to finish it off I added a basic title at the end fade out. I had to trim and fine-tune the song a bit to get it to suit the timing of the film and also added a fade out to it.

Finally, the Treasure Chest project is done and I have successfully created a fully rendered animation short and 3D asset from scratch. The amount of experience I gained with this project is really amazing. I learnt many fundamentals of the 3D pipeline, how to texture a 3D asset which also gave me some much-needed experience with Photoshop. I experienced the joys of animation and misery of unwrapping. But everything I’ve learned with this project is overshadowed by just how much I still don’t know. There is so much to learn with each and every area that it makes me realize why people specialize themselves into one or two specific fields. Now the door on this project is closing, another is opening with my next project. To create a 3D object that is functional within a game engine. With this new project I’m going to really focus on expanding my skills with modelling and texturing.